Origins

The First World War has always been there - an event that marked the real beginning of what Eric Hobsbawn called the short twentieth century.  As the centenary of the start of the war approaches I started thinking about how I first heard about it and how I learnt about it.

I've always had a fascination for history - and subsequently studied it at university.  I'd always been fascinated by the modern period, the 19th and 20th centuries and inevitably the two World Wars are major events that dominate any study of British or European history. But I'd known about the wars long before I'd studied them, and so it was within my own family that I'd first heard the war mentioned: a paternal grandfather who had served in the Army in West Africa (after also taking part in the Boer War) and a widowed great aunt whose first husband had been killed in Flanders - it was only much later that he's been killed on the Somme.

Outside of the family my first encounter with the war was via the War Poets: our history syllabus at this time was still stuck in the 19th century.  We studied the usual suspects and then our teacher took us of to the local film theatre to see Richard Attenborough's film of Oh! What A Lovely War.  I had never seen anything like it, and it was this that also launched my lifelong fascination with film.

The film is full of brilliant images - the constant cutting between Brighton pier and the Western Front is superb.  Subsequently I've seen it on stage several times, but nothing has ever matched the emotional punch of seeing the final sequence for the first time:

My aim with this blog is to track the history of the First World War - but one hundred years on.  There are other websites where you can track the major event on a day to day basis, but I want to write about the less well known events and to share the way that writers (historians and/or novelists) , film makers and musicians have reacted to the war.

I also want to make it clear that this is not in any way a celebration of the war.  I've been collecting material (articles and quotations) on the War for some time, and the one that best sums up my fascination with the period comes from novelist Pat Barker:

The Somme is like the Holocaust: it revealed things we cannot come to terms with and cannot forget.  It never becomes the past.